Far-right outsider Abelardo de la Espriella will face left-wing Senator Ivan Cepeda in the runoff for Colombia’s presidential election next month.
After polls closed on Sunday, the two candidates quickly surged ahead in the vote tally, extinguishing the hopes of right-wing Senator Paloma Valencia, a former frontrunner.
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As of Sunday afternoon, with 99 percent of the votes tallied, de la Espriella took the lead, with 43 percent of the ballots cast in his favour.
Cepeda trailed him by more than 600,000 votes, earning 40 percent support.
Neither candidate breached the 50-percent threshold needed to avoid a head-to-head match-up on June 21. But the results are likely to buoy de la Espriella’s campaign going into the final round.
Cepeda had consistently topped public opinion polls in the final weeks before voting. A May 24 poll from the National Consulting Centre (CNC), for instance, showed him with more than 33 percent support, ahead of de la Espriella’s 30.9 percent.
De la Espriella’s ‘outsider’ campaign
Questions about security, however, were at the forefront of voters’ concerns going into Sunday’s election.
De la Espriella, a businessman and lawyer who has never held elected office, leaned heavily into fears of crime as he launched an outsider campaign, similar to the dark-horse bid of Argentinian President Javier Milei.
By contrast, Cepeda is a well-known quantity in Colombian politics. His father was a senator too before he was assassinated in 1994, in what was widely considered to be an act of political violence.
Cepeda himself has served as a senator since 2014. Before that, he served in the Chamber of Deputies, representing the capital Bogota.
During his political career, he became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute with former right-wing President Alvaro Uribe, whom he accused of complicity with right-wing paramilitaries.
Uribe initially sued Cepeda for defamation, but in a dramatic twist, Colombia’s Supreme Court dismissed the charge and instead investigated Uribe for witness tampering.
While Uribe was initially found guilty and sentenced to 12 years of house arrest, an appeals court ultimately struck down the verdict, citing procedural errors, including insufficient evidence.
Security a top concern
Central to the rift in Colombia’s politics is the country’s six-decade-long internal conflict.
Since 1964, criminal networks, government forces, left-wing rebels and right-wing paramilitaries have all jockeyed against one another for power and territory.
Cepeda has been critical of right-wing efforts to solve the conflict through military might alone.
Instead, he has allied himself with Colombia’s outgoing president, Gustavo Petro, the first left-wing figure ever elected to the country’s highest office.
A former rebel fighter, Petro has championed a policy he calls “Total Peace”, which actively seeks negotiated solutions to the fighting.
While critics have questioned the efficacy of “Total Peace”, pointing to a recent uptick in violence, Cepeda has nevertheless pledged to carry it forward. He represents Petro’s left-wing Historic Pact party in this year’s election.
In an interview this month with CNN, Cepeda acknowledged “immense challenges” with the policy, saying, “We cannot continue to develop conversations that do not yield clear results.”
But he rejected overly militaristic solutions, as well as the prospect of intervention by the United States. The US-led “war on drugs”, Cepeda said, has “failed spectacularly”.
De la Espriella, meanwhile, has embraced the kind of hardline security platform commonly associated with El Salvador’s leader Nayib Bukele.
His platform includes a pledge to undertake a crackdown on crime and build 10 mega-prisons in Colombia.
Nicknamed “The Tiger”, he founded the Defenders of the Homeland political party, and he is known to rally with the slogan, “Stand firm for the nation.”
“The only peace process I believe in is one imposed by the force of arms and the laws of the republic,” de la Espriella told The Associated Press this month.
Like United States President Donald Trump, de la Espriella has also threatened to launch a bombing campaign to disrupt drug-trafficking, killing suspects by downing planes and shooting boats.
But such campaigns have been widely denounced as a form of extrajudicial killing, effectively denying suspects the chance of defending themselves in a court of law.
Narrowing odds for Colombia’s left
More than 23.6 million Colombians voted in Sunday’s election, though there was a high number of blank or nullified ballots.
Early estimates, with 99 percent of ballots tallied, indicate that 245,342 voting sheets were null, and another 406,830 were left blank.
The second round is likely to be an uphill battle for Cepeda. Colombia’s right-wing is expected to consolidate behind de la Espriella in the second round.
In Sunday’s vote count, more than 10.3 million ballots were cast for de la Espriella, compared to roughly 9.7 million for Cepeda.
A victory for the right would continue a regional trend in Latin America. Last year alone, left-wing governments in Chile, Honduras and Bolivia were all replaced by right-wing presidential contenders.
De la Espriella signalled his optimism about the second round in a social media post as the results rolled in.
“We are going to defeat tyranny and absolutism,” de la Espriella wrote. “We have advanced to the runoff thanks to the more than 10 million Colombians who answered the roar. In 21 days, we will make history!”
